Miami-Dade GOP secretary resigns weeks after racist group chat comes to light
A Miami-Dade Republican Party official resigned Monday and filed a federal First Amendment lawsuit against Florida International University, nearly three weeks after the racist and slur-filled content of a group chat he created for campus conservatives last fall became public.
The controversy has roiled party leadership and student political groups at FIU, as the party grapples with its increasingly emboldened far right.
Abel Carvajal, a third year law student at FIU and now-former Miami-Dade GOP secretary, resigned just hours before a scheduled special meeting Monday evening to discuss and vote on his future in the party. That meeting has since been cancelled. His resignation also came the same morning he filed a federal lawsuit against FIU president Jeanette Nuñez.
“Many elected officials wanted to be on the record in condemning this behavior,” Miami-Dade GOP Chairman Kevin Cooper told the Miami Herald about the planned meeting.
He added in a public statement after Carvajal’s resignation, “As this ugly episode ends, we reaffirm ourselves to the mission ahead: to elect Republicans to office up and down the ballot.”
Carvajal created a WhatsApp group for young conservatives last fall and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven,” according to chat logs obtained by the Herald.
In a letter to the party’s executive committee that Carvajal posted on social media, he apologized for “this situation,” reiterating that he did not post or see the most offensive content in the chat.
Group chat logs obtained by the Herald show that Carvajal didn’t explicitly use the n-word like others in the chat. He did, however, use words that appeared similar to racist slurs — including variations of slurs referring to Black women and children — but with the “n” replaced with an “m” at the beginning of the words.
“The language used in that context was inappropriate,” he wrote in his resignation letter Monday. “Regardless of the intentions behind the language used, it was wrong. I understand why it is offensive, and I take that seriously. Intent does not excuse impact.”
The majority of the resignation letter Carvajal posted on social media, however, focused on the fact that the chats were leaked —- rather than the content of the chat itself.
“My continued service to our Party as the Secretary is a small price to pay to ensure that the leaks and press focus on our party can end,” Carvajal wrote. He added that in private phone calls, “many [Republicans] expressed their contempt at those who have leaked this chat and have caused further harm to the image of our party.”
Publicly, there have been few — if any — high-profile Republicans who have denounced the leaking of the chat. Far more Republicans, including Sen. Rick Scott and Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, publicly decried their content.
Resignation on the heels of a lawsuit against FIU
In a phone call with the Herald, Carvajal said he was resigning for the good of the party, and said he had been making calls and had allies “whipping up support.” He said he believes he would have had enough support in the party to remain in leadership had Monday’s planned vote gone through.
He said his resignation was motivated — in part — by the fact that he is also suing FIU and its president over its handling of the leaked group chat and didn’t want the party to be affiliated with that ongoing legal battle.
“I don’t want my own litigation in federal court to be a distraction from what the party should be doing,” Carvajal said.
Early Monday, Carvajal filed a federal lawsuit against FIU’s president seeking to block student misconduct charges her administration filed against him. The lawsuit alleges that the Nuñez administration’s charges violate Carvajal’s First Amendment rights.
FIU charged Carvajal with student conduct and honor code violations March 11, according to an official notice attached to the lawsuit. Per the notice, FIU received reports last fall that Carvajal participated in a group chat that included “controversial content, including racist remarks.”
FIU declined to comment about the lawsuit Monday.
Carvajal’s attorney, Anthony Sabatini, said in an interview that FIU’s charges are still pending, but they can move forward with quasi-judicial proceedings in which a jury of university administrators decide whether the student is guilty. Sabatini called the charges against Carvajal “obviously false and a violation of the First Amendment.”
Sabatini is also representing a group of students suing the University of Florida after the school disbanded its College Republicans chapter over alleged racist behavior, including a member who threw a Nazi salute in a photo that circulated social media.
Sabatini is also representing a UF law student who was kicked off campus last year after making a slew of antisemitic social media posts, including one calling for the elimination of Jews “by any means necessary.” That case is currently tied up in appeals courts.
El Nuevo Herald staff reporter Verónica Egui Brito contributed to this report.
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